Incendiary
by The Kindly One
Summary: The real reason Todoroki built his dorm room from scratch. Can be Bakugo/Todoroki if you want. Or not, if you don't. One-shot. Todo angst.


_Summary: The real reason Todoroki built his dorm room from scratch._

Incendiary

Sometimes, it was all just too much.

Of course, if you looked at things from the outside, everything seemed just fine. Everything seemed perfectly normal. Orderly. Ordinary. It's not like Shoto was given to emotional displays, after all. He spoke in a monotone voice. He gave monosyllabic answers. His life was a montone life: Dull, emotionless, without variation. Day after day. Week after week. His appearance maybe gave a hint at his deeper, dual nature, but his behavior was always perfectly consistent. He executed. He achieved. He performed.

He performed, and sometimes it was just that...a performance.

In order to perform at the level he did, he minimized, monosyllabized. He squashed things down. He pared excess away. He economized everything, distilling everything down to a perfect, pared away life. His room. His clothes. His words. Himself.

But sometimes things just got...messy. Disorderly. Complicated.

Feelings that he thought he had under control would sometimes come bubbling up to the surface. Like a dormant volcano that suddenly just...wasn't. Like the day he came home after the whole Kamino Ward incident. At first, everything seemed normal. Typical. His sister was there at the door, greeting him with her usual welcoming smile. His dad was there, muttering under his breath about his poor performance at school (the usual background accompaniment in the elevator music of his life). His mother, of course, was not there. Her sound was the sound of an empty room. Empty space. Silence. So, ordinary. And after having a simple bowl of ramen in the kitchen, Shoto went up to his room. His unpacked school bag was still by the door. He walked into the perfect, gleaming threadbare space and he just stared out the window. Out at nothing.

But the nothing was starting to fill up with _something_. Something loud. Something threatening. Something irrational. Something dangerous.

Something incendiary.

It started with a crack. A crack in the base of the lamp by Shoto's bed. A crack in his careful facade. It was maybe a couple of millimeters long, the crack, but it was there. Noticeable. Ugly. Marring the alabaster green of the porcelain base. Like the scar over his face. As Shoto noticed the crack, he felt his feet moving of their own accord toward the lamp. He stood there looking at it. At the crack. He stared at it, and he started to feel things. Things he didn't want to feel.

Feelings scratching to get out.

The silence in the room became deafening. And suddenly, they were all there. Like sharp toothed animals, skulking out from the dark. From behind the blinds, the bed, the shelves. Creatures with glowing eyes, waiting to draw blood. His feelings were clawing their way out. Scratching, digging. And in a moment of sublime weakness—or delirious abandon—he let them out.

He reached out with a flick of his wrist and knocked the lamp from its perch, and it hit the floor with a musical _ting!_

The music was sweet but it wasn't enough to fill the silence. To fill the empty space in his heart and in his head, which was quickly filling up with rage. Rage at his father. Rage at his family. Rage at the rules hero society imposed on him. Rage at his own inadequacies, his own helplessness. Because that's what he felt most: Helpless. He had fooled himself into believing he could master his own insecurities, his own flaws. But no...the alley fight, the summer camp, Kamino Ward—all of these things made it clear to him that he was indeed helpless. Useless. A pretender. An inadequate novice. A failure.

All of the things his father told him he was and more.

The lamp flew across the room and bounced off the wall, refusing to break. Shoto, determined, picked it up and swung it against his clothes cupboard. Again. And again. And again. Each loud _thunk! _spurred him on, made each hit just a little bit harder, the bamboo cupboard bowing under the stress (much like himself) until the porcelain finally gave with a satisfying, crescendoing _crash! _ The pieces exploded in his hand like a live grenade, jagged shards of ginseng green mixed with flakes of red littering the tatami flooring. The pain felt intoxicating, the slip in control almost seductive in its spell. Fueled by this temporary sense of release, Shoto stared down at the paper shade, still mostly intact, and he raised his hand and he—

The thin material went up almost instantly, consumed by his flames. Light danced maniacally in teal and grey eyes. The monotone boy who didn't seem to feel anything was actually smiling, for once—smiling at his own obliterating force. If he couldn't save, then he would destroy. If he couldn't be perfect, then he would render all imperfect. If he couldn't…

_He couldn't…_

_He didn't…_

A memory of his hand failing to grasp a little red ball at the very last second sent flames scorching up the side of his clothes cupboard. But he found that the dried bamboo burned too quickly for him to squelch the all-consuming thoughts that were raging through his head.

_He had failed his friends…_

_He had failed his mom…_

_He had failed himself…_

Shoto whirled, his chest heaving with untempered emotion as he looked for yet another helpless object to destroy. His mismatched eyes alighted on his expensive speaker system. Without thinking, he picked up the biggest of the broken lamp pieces and stabbed the sharp end through the cloth covering. It sliced through the outer skin like a rapier, making a screeching _rip! _even as the vindictive porcelain bit at his fingers. Blood trickled down in tiny rivelets, making inlets over his wrist.

He wasn't finished.

No, ripping wasn't enough. So he reached into the burning cupboard—the momentary flash of pain searing his skin like a lover's kiss—and he ripped out the clothes bar and started smashing the speakers with it. Over and over again. They toppled from the bookcase and bounced on the ground like hopping toads. Splattered, murdered toads. And why not smash the shelves, too? So he started doing that, reinforcing the metal bar with ice when it seemed like it would break, because he wasn't through with his emotional bloodletting.

_Don't come, Deku!_

Failure, failure, such a failure. Why couldn't he control anything? Why was his power not enough? Why wasn't _he_ good enough? Why, when it came down to the wire, did he always fuck things up? Was he truly that self-destructive, deep down inside? But still, that was no excuse to drag others down with him—

_Too bad, Shoto Todoroki…_

The little red ball was receding again in his mind. And the flames on his clothes cupboard were creeping upward. Like kudzu vines: Invasive, consuming, devouring. Shoto panted with emotion and physical exertion, slamming the clothes bar against the wall when he was done turning the shelves into kindling. He dropped to his knees in the middle of his room and stared into the flames. Into the misery of his own making. Into the destructive power of his own poisonous emotions. Into his own personal abyss.

It was like standing in the middle of an erupting volcano. Everything was molten, golden. The flames shimmered: Hypnotic, entrancing. If he didn't stop the fire soon, it was going to get out of control.

(He was already out of control.)

As Shoto slumped, mentally and physically exhausted, on the unburnt section of the tatami, he heard a throat clear loudly behind him. With his eyes glazed and his mouth hanging open, he slowly turned his head towards the door. Standing by the entrance of his room was Bakugo Katsuki.

Shoto blinked several times, unsure if this was real or a hallucination. His pulse pounded loudly at his temples; sweat beaded over his brow. Little pinpricks of pain stung his fingers, marching across his skin like fire ants. Shoto crawled across the mat until he could prop his back against the wall. He sat there and watched his cupboard burn. After a few moments, a black clad shadow joined him, mirroring his pose. The not-hallucination of Bakugo finally said:

"You know, I always thought you were an uppity, tight ass bastard..."

Bakugo kicked at one of the broken speakers with his red and black boot. It toppled over in surrender. Shoto continued to stare straight ahead, saying nothing.

"...but maybe I was wrong about you, halfie."

Shoto wondered just how long Bakugo had been standing there. How much he had actually seen. A part of him cringed at the thought of his classmate seeing him so thoroughly out of control, so completely undone, but another more rebellious part of him felt…

..._exhilarated._

There was a sense of catharsis, of relief. And maybe even an odd sense of connection. _I am not who you think I am, _thought Shoto. _I am not perfect. I am not an emotionless object. I am not infallible or indifferent or arrogant. I am not any of these things. I am—_

_I am just a boy who wants his mother…_

A slight smile twitched at the corner of Shoto's mouth. There was a loud frustrated sigh next to him, and then: "You know, if you don't put out that fire soon, it's gonna burn down the whole house." Shoto turned his head to find Bakugo watching him, a thoughtful expression on the blond's face. But it disappeared like a magician's trick the moment their eyes met and a smirk appeared and the explosive hero shrugged and said, "But hey, it's fine by me if you wanna let it burn. Hell, I'll even help you along. The bed's intact, but one blast from me and we can call it a day. So whadyasay? Still got an appetite for destruction, half-and-half?"

Shoto answered by sending a sheet of ice up the skeletal remains of the cupboard. Steam instantly filled the room like a sauna, masking the ruin. Bakugo stood up, a ghostly figure brushing off his pants, and said, "Guess that's a 'no' then." His back retreated through the fog of steam. A strange, alien feeling of desperation graveled Shoto's voice as he blurted out:

"You know, we're not so different, you and I."

Unkempt blond hair, wreathed in a smoky halo, paused at the door.

"Yey, I sorta get that now." And then he was gone. With no explanation. Shoto realized that he had never even bothered to explain why he was there in the first place. Shoto sighed and looked around at the disaster that was his bedroom. As Bakugo had pointed out, his bed was still intact. So Shoto got up and drug his feet to the bed, falling face-first into his pillow. In a few days, the new dorms at U.A. high would be finished. He would be moving in. Which meant...

...which meant tomorrow Shoto would need to shop for all new furniture.


End file.
